Loved this post, + I agree that exact reuse of past stuff feels super vapid/risks rehashing old stuff in a way that becomes inescapable—I think about 'hauntology' of the past + this quote from Mark Fisher/Robin Mackay's piece (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_pomo.htm) about 'pomophobia':
"What Cobain's weighed down by above all is the dead heaviness of the past, the overwhelming sense that everything has already been done. When Kurt Cobain first heard the punk records that would excite and inspire him, they were already old news, the fading afterglow of long-extinct stars. He lived, he always knew, in the arid cultural interregnum that Jameson, referring to an ostensibly very different cultural sphere, called "a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past." (PCS 18)
"When we listen to an artist like Sophie, regardless of our personal opinion of her music, it’s hard to imagine that she would fail to induce ‘future shock’ in listeners from 20 years ago. Sophie’s music exists on the boundaries of what could even be considered popular music. We might say that blend of the abrasive and the angelic exists solely to subvert the expectations of the listener. Fisher’s conclusion that a contemporary song wouldn’t produce any ‘jolt’ in an audience of the past seems almost absurd when we consider a track like Faceshopping...Both the visual and auditory aesthetics of this video have been created to provide a sense of future shock in the listener. These are not cultural forms of the past ominously haunting the present, these are images of a virtual future being rendered into contemporary culture. This is something unlike anything we’ve seen before. This is anti-hauntology."
Loved this post, + I agree that exact reuse of past stuff feels super vapid/risks rehashing old stuff in a way that becomes inescapable—I think about 'hauntology' of the past + this quote from Mark Fisher/Robin Mackay's piece (http://www.ccru.net/swarm1/1_pomo.htm) about 'pomophobia':
"What Cobain's weighed down by above all is the dead heaviness of the past, the overwhelming sense that everything has already been done. When Kurt Cobain first heard the punk records that would excite and inspire him, they were already old news, the fading afterglow of long-extinct stars. He lived, he always knew, in the arid cultural interregnum that Jameson, referring to an ostensibly very different cultural sphere, called "a world in which stylistic innovation is no longer possible, [where] all that is left is to imitate dead styles, to speak through the masks and with the voices of the styles in the imaginary museum. But this means that contemporary or postmodernist art is going to be about art itself in a new kind of way; even more, it means that one of its essential messages will involve the necessary failure of art and the aesthetic, the failure of the new, the imprisonment in the past." (PCS 18)
There was a really great post that followed right after SOPHIE's death also about 'anti-hauntology' and moving beyond stylistic futurism and into stuff that legitimately innovates with new techniques—I found it (https://bluelabyrinths.com/2021/02/02/anti-hauntology-mark-fisher-sophie-and-the-music-of-the-future/) super encouraging/energizing:
"When we listen to an artist like Sophie, regardless of our personal opinion of her music, it’s hard to imagine that she would fail to induce ‘future shock’ in listeners from 20 years ago. Sophie’s music exists on the boundaries of what could even be considered popular music. We might say that blend of the abrasive and the angelic exists solely to subvert the expectations of the listener. Fisher’s conclusion that a contemporary song wouldn’t produce any ‘jolt’ in an audience of the past seems almost absurd when we consider a track like Faceshopping...Both the visual and auditory aesthetics of this video have been created to provide a sense of future shock in the listener. These are not cultural forms of the past ominously haunting the present, these are images of a virtual future being rendered into contemporary culture. This is something unlike anything we’ve seen before. This is anti-hauntology."
Anyways great post + I am excited to read more!
yooo these are some great pieces - thank you for sharing!